What Can You Do When You Don't Have A Culture?

Not that much, actually.

I was looking through the comment threads recently, and I saw that quite a few people had said, at different times, things like “I’m surprised you didn't mention…” or “You should also have said something about…” or “You should have extended your argument…” and many similar things. The reality, of course, is that I’m writing essays, not books, and I try to keep them within a manageable compass of about five thousand words. So far, I’ve been successful, and I’m honestly grateful that so many of you still seem to be ready to engage with essays of that length on complex subjects. But I do make a note of these suggestions, and I’ll come back to them later if I think I’m competent to do so.

These essays will always be free, but you can support my work by liking and commenting, and most of all by passing the essays on to others, and passing the links to other sites that you frequent. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.☕️

And thanks again to those who continue to provide translations. Versions in Spanish are available here, and some Italian versions of my essays are available here. Marco Zeloni is also posting some Italian translations, and has set up a dedicated website for them here.Thanks finally to others who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages. A second French translation of one of my essays by Hubert Mulkens will be published next week (I’m having a week off from original posts.). And now….

I’ve had a lot to say in these essays about the incompetence of our western ruling class, both what I call the Inner Party, the ruling trans-party political establishment and its shadowy supporters, and the Outer Party, which some describe as the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC), which exists to serve them, and whose more ambitious members hope one day to join them. Like other writers, I have traced this incompetence to changes in the structure of politics, the development of a worryingly homogeneous and hermetically sealed class of powerful individuals extending well beyond politics and into the media and public life generally, as well as to the stultifying sameness of neoliberal ideology, and to a detachment both from reality, and from those who actually have to deal with that reality.

In that essay, I noted the paradox that, for all the vaunted “professionalism” of our political class, their actual performance even as politicians is very amateurish, and I tried to explain why this is so. Here, I want to focus on one consequence of all of these factors: the inability of western political classes to communicate ideas competently, to discuss and debate, and to convince electorates of the wisdom of their policies. Instead of that, these classes communicate with their electorates from a position of unreflective superiority, like parents to children or teachers to students. Rather than seeking to persuade, they seek to intimidate and bully, to insult the electorate into voting for them, and to suppress and censor, as far as possible, the opinions of those they disagree with and that they do not want us to hear.

There are obviously some pragmatic explanations for this deeply unattractive posture. As has been pointed out many times, today’s political class and its parasites often have a very narrow and selective education, limited capacity and almost no practical experience of doing anything useful. The skills needed to succeed in politics today are the skills of climbing the hierarchy of the Party, not of appealing to the electorate. This produces the mixture of arrogance and insecurity that typifies our current rulers, and their ignorance and fear of events and ideas that fall outside the confines of their rigid ideology. This is also why, slapped in the face by the real world, as they have been with Covid and Ukraine, they behave like dementia patients, denying reality and sometimes lashing out verbally and even physically.

But I have something else in mind as well. It’s obvious that our Inner and Outer Parties have lost any ability to communicate with the electorates and the media audiences in their respective countries. Now whilst it’s true that traditionally most electorates had a healthy scepticism about the pronouncements of politicians and didn’t believe everything they read in the (then) newspapers, such distrust has now reached epidemic proportions. Large parts of  western electorates assume as a matter of course now that the government is lying to them, and as for the media, that beacon of truth and rectitude, well, in most countries journalists are about as trusted as second-hand car salesmen.

It’s not as if they weren’t trying. After all, “communication” is now recognised as a fundamental skill of politics, and not just political parties but private companies, public institutions and even NGOs now have communications specialists, often well paid. I saw the interesting statistic recently that there are more communications specialists in France than there are professional journalists, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that it’s the same in most countries. Immense effort now goes into “messaging”, with “messages” tailored to individual sectors, as perceived by the highly-paid specialists who manage all of this.

But it doesn’t work, does it? I’m trying to remember the last time that some well-chosen words by a political leader actually helped to resolve a problem. Consider Keir Starmer’s recent macho posturing after the riots and disturbances in Britain. A traditional politician would have known what to say: you can write it now on a scrap of paper. Terrible incident, sympathy to relatives of victims, entirely understand feelings, but this is absolutely not the way to react, everybody calm down and don’t believe what you see in the media. That’s enough. But in fact, Starmer appeared to be treating the protesters themselves as a threat to national security, not to mention incipient fascists, and relegating the deaths of three children to a detail which had been “instrumentalised” by dark political forces, and which only Nazis could care about. Whatever you think of the underlying issues, this is quite simply incompetent and counter-productive, and undermined Starmer’s status as a serious politician when he was barely getting used to the furniture at 10 Downing Street. Over in France, President Macron and his acolytes have scarcely been able to contain their sneering public disdain for the majority of the French people who do not approve of their policies and did not vote for them last month. But equally, after riots last year in Paris that led to widespread theft and destruction of property, Jean-Luc Mélenchon took to the media to hail a “popular uprising,” which was not actually popular with its victims. Often, you wish these people would just keep their mouths shut, before they do any more damage.

Still, the problems are not only political. In 1984 you may remember, one of the Party’s objectives was to decrease the size of the English vocabulary each year, to make dissident thoughts increasingly difficult to express, and replace many existing words with NewSpeak. In effect, that’s where we are going now: the vocabulary and the set of concepts available for political discussion is being reduced every year, not by the Party, so much as by the pressures of modern politics and the ravages inflicted on education and public knowledge by forty years of neoliberalism. These days, the area of permitted discourse, the comparisons you can make, the vocabulary you can use, even the facts you can cite, are diminishing all the time, which means that the gap between what is happening in the world and what can be said about it grows all the time.

In any competently-run government, there will be collections of verbal elements to be deployed in particular circumstances, on pretty much all subjects. A Minister who’s going to be interviewed will be (or should be) prepared for that interview with a short background note and a list of points to get over. In many cases, these points are recycled over time, updated as necessary. So even a neophyte like Starmer should have been briefed to avoid making the situation worse. Either he wasn’t, or more likely he didn’t take any notice. But this process becomes more and more difficult each year anyway, as the spectrum of opinions that can be expressed, and the words that could be used to express them, reduce further and further. We are thus in a situation where the political class simply has no idea what to say if the issue is one where there is not an approved verbal formula ready and waiting. You push a button but only nonsense comes out. Staying with Starmer and Macron for the moment, consider how the Party wants the “debate” on immigration structured. (This is almost certainly not what the Party “thinks,” but we’ll let that go.) Imagine a piece of paper somewhere which lists the things it is acceptable to say about immigration. It wouldn’t have to be very long.

• Immigration is a wonderful net benefit to all countries at all times.

• Anyone who doesn’t agree is a fascist.

• All migrants are asylum seekers fleeing war, famine and political repression.

• Nothing must be done which would stigmatise immigrant communities.

• We must fiercely combat the extreme Right who are trying to exploit fears of ignorant ordinary people.

And that, with variations, is about it. Now even if you believe that all of these points are true, or at least arguable, it’s obvious that the Party has nothing in its verbal locker to deploy when ordinary people raise everyday questions about immigration. For example: one quarter of my child’s school class consists of children who don’t speak our native language well and can’t follow lessons properly. Several of them are orphans from countries like Afghanistan, who need psychiatric help. This is bad for everyone, what are you doing about it? Now since the official Party discourse is that there are never any practical problems resulting from immigration, it follows that these problems must be imaginary and therefore nothing needs to be done.

I’ve often made the point that in politics what is not said, and not done, is frequently more important than what is. When the ideological locker is so bare, when the file labelled Things that can Safely be Said is so disappointingly thin, a political class confronted with unexpected problems relapses into clichés and insults, or just into silence. So in France now, every time a violent crime is reported, especially one involving firearms, popular opinion immediately assumes that the perpetrators or suspects must be from an immigrant background. (Sometimes this is actually the case, but by no means always.) But why this assumption? Well, otherwise the authorities would have named the individuals and published their photographs. And what tends to happen in such cases is that the authorities, and even more the PMC-adjacent media, give out information as slowly and unwillingly as possible, in the hope that people will quickly forget about the incident. This is actually stupid and unprofessional, since far from preventing immigrant communities being “stigmatised” it actively encourages it. But it’s all that the Party knows how to do: bury things they can’t find a way of talking about.

What we are dealing with here is the impoverishment and debasement of the conceptual and verbal skills of the political classes of the West and their parasites, to a point where they cannot communicate with ordinary people except through preaching and finger-wagging, and have in any case nothing of any interest to say. I think this combination of weaknesses is probably unprecedented in modern history.

Of course, there have been other ingrown and remote ruling classes throughout history, but usually they have been able to muster at least some claim to legitimacy. The traditional aristocracies of Europe, for example, considered themselves, and to some extent were believed by others, to be “better” than ordinary people. They were part of a divinely designated, or at least divinely approved, social order, and their genes and their education fitted them to be natural rulers. In turn, they were a class with obligations, that provided diplomats, military leaders and court officials. Communist parties in power the world over drew their legitimacy from claiming to be the true representatives of the working class, and the enlightened elite guiding the masses towards a communist society. Anti-colonialist movements around the world, justified taking and holding onto power by the role they played in the “struggle.” And of course Political Islam in power has its own built-in legitimacy, that does not depend on the ballot box.

Today’s Party has none of these claims to legitimacy nor, so far as I can see, any other. It is simply made up of ambitious people with broadly convergent views on a range of issues but no developed ideology. Its individuals might be highly credentialed, but nobody really believes that collectively they represent some kind of intellectual elite. Likewise, they don’t really represent anybody, nor can they claim any real justification in political theory: a point I’ll return to. After all, Liberalism, which is as close to an ideology as the Party has, is not a coherent body of theory, but a set of a priori axioms largely concerned with the rights of individuals to economic and social freedom. It can’t by definition provide a general set of principles for managing a society, still less one that would convince the general population, much of which gains little from Liberal theories anyway. Inevitably, therefore, the Party feels nervous and defensive, asserting a legitimacy that it can’t actually justify convincingly, and which is increasingly questioned by the populations it governs.

The traditional aristocracies did try to live up to their billing as superior people to some extent. Depending on the country, they spoke languages, were reasonably well educated, travelled, and often acted as patrons of the Arts: it was what was expected. And the western political classes that replaced them were initially drawn from a wide variety of backgrounds: everything from manual labourers to well-to-do lawyers, through teachers, small businessmen, retired military officers, trades union officials and academics and former civil servants.

It’s a paradox therefore, (or maybe not, on reflection) that the Party is probably the most educated ruling class in modern history, yet also the class that understands the world the least. (It seems clear that the Party has no comprehension at all of the historical resonances for Russia of its Ukraine policy for example.) It is, to employ a useful distinction, credentialed, rather than educated. Many of the subjects it notionally studies are highly theoretical and normative, and thus suitable for a ruling class that exists in a normative bubble from which it issues orders. Here and there we may see someone with a degree in a scientific or technical subject, or a language or in History, but they are lost in the crowds of Political Science and Economics graduates. The result, as many have noticed, is a complete, yawning void where the guiding principles of any dominant political group should be. Indeed, the absence of any real intellectual depth in what passes for the ideology of the Party is screamingly obvious. The Party cannot sensibly answer the simple question, What are you in power for? But then, like Orwell’s Party, it is in power to be in power.

In turn, this is because the Liberal conception of politics and government is purely technocratic and managerial. Politics is not “about” anything. Indeed, today’s leaders very seldom like to acknowledge that political ideologies and divisions even exist. Like Macron in France, they want to go “beyond” the “outdated” distinctions of Left and Right, which are a nuisance and complicate the smooth exercise of managerial power. So every problem has a rational solution, and any group of reasonable people will converge on that solution given time. Given a little more time, the voters themselves will come to understand the correctness of the Party’s analysis and prescriptions, unless they are confused by ideologues of Left or Right, from whose machinations they must be protected. Inevitably, therefore, the Party cannot deal with, or even  talk about, any problems that do not have a neat managerial solution, which is nearly all of them. Inevitably also, the Party becomes angry and defensive when the electorate, or indeed the world, presents them with the kind of problems that people actually experience in their everyday lives, and to which the Party’s limited intellectual capabilities have no answer. It therefore lashes out, trying to intimidate or even censor its critics into silence.

This gap between how the Party thinks and what the people think, is more than just a gap of experience and education, though. In spite of what the Party itself tries to pretend, education does not itself make you more likely to accept the Party’s worldview. Rather, higher education these days is dominated by Outer Party members in teaching and administrative roles, but this dominance is not total, and it is still possible to emerge from university (or even teach there) with your brains intact and having had a decent education. Joining the Outer Party is a choice after all, generally a result of ambition.

Accepting its ideology (which is of course subject to change at any moment) means accepting what happen to be today’s precepts derived from Liberalism’s a priori assumptions, and uncritically following the Party line as it cycles through different interpretations of them. Unlike, say, the Communist parties of the past, disputes within the Inner Party today are seldom about ideology as such, but rather about the distribution of power between the different feuding interest and identity groups that make it up. And there is no central authority able to decide, as in a traditional political party, so every iteration of its ideology is the result of exhausting, often public, struggles. All powerful groups have to be accommodated somehow, so what often looks like hypocrisy and double standards is better understood as a complex intellectual balancing exercise, akin to Orwell’s Doublethink, which holds that some principle either is or is not universally true depending on the context, and on which interest or identity group is currently more powerful. The consciousness of the intellectual contortions and the moral compromises that this process entails help to explain the violence of the Party’s reaction to criticism.

The result of all this is an incoherent and frequently-changing ideology which is void of almost all real content, and is a vehicle for gaining and holding political power, not a genuine system of belief. (Indeed, it could be argued that it doesn’t even really qualify as an ideology.) It is not something that gives meaning to peoples’ lives, nor anything to struggle for except power and wealth. Almost by definition, the causes it identifies are elitist, and contrary to the interests of ordinary people. Sometimes, as with the vandalism inflicted on universities in recent decades, these causes actually operate against the interests of the Outer Party.

In many ways the emptiness of this ideology is explained by its relentlessly negative character, which is inherited from the a priori assumptions of Liberalism itself. Liberalism after all was essentially against everything: not just the inherited social and political order, but all tradition, all customs, all religious beliefs, all superstition, indeed all aspects of existing culture; and sought to replace these relics with scientific principles and rationality. Liberalism, in the fantasies of Auguste Comte and others, would bring about a perfectly rational utopia, but it was never clear what people in this utopia would do, or how they would actually live, or what meaning their lives would have. This rigorous scientism has degenerated now into a kind of gutless facile managerialism, but its objective—a society ruled by rational principles, strictly applied—remains in force. The Positivist belief that society could be studied and managed according to rules analogous to those of physics and chemistry has itself degenerated into rule by spreadsheet. Our masters, perhaps unconsciously channeling Pythagoras, have decided that only numbers are real, and that if the experience of ordinary people contradicts the numbers, then that experience must be false and can be disregarded.

From this in turn follows the Liberal belief in norms, and the concurrent faith that just writing something down as a law or a rule makes it come true. Dealing with actual reality by comparison is tedious, which is why members of the Outer Party go into the law, the media, think-tanks, public relations and management consultancies; telling other people what to do and what to think, rather than actually doing anything practical themselves. It follows that the really important issues and the really important battles are at the intellectual level, which is where the Party feels more comfortable anyway, and that controlling thought is more important than controlling reality. (Some of these people probably attended a lecture on Hegel once, even if, like most of us, they couldn’t understand much of it.) As a result, the success of a government policy is judged not in practical terms (except insofar as previously selected metrics can be selectively deployed in PowerPoint presentations) but in the government’s success or otherwise in silencing and marginalising dissent and opposition, after which reality may be assumed to take care of itself.

Thus, the Party is engaged in incessant intellectual warfare, and almost always against, rather than for things. And its targets are almost always conceptual, rather than real. Thus, rather than seeking to put an end to homelessness, which would require actual things to be done by people with real skills and competence, the Party is much happier with the struggle against the stigmatisation of homeless immigrants and mental patients, where all you need to do is to publicly insult people from the comfort of your own home and office. Indeed, when in the final days of the disastrous Presidency of François Hollande (2012-17) the still-twitching corpse was asked what its concept of government was, and what the dying Socialist Party actually stood for, the reply was “the struggle against all forms of discrimination.” This perfectly encapsulates the intellectual void at the heart of the Party’s thinking. Real governments don’t “struggle”: they do things, but that’s too difficult. Insults are cheaper and easier.

Needless to say, most people (including most educated people) don’t think like this. Their existence is embodied in families, in social structures and relations, in language, in tradition, in history and culture, and in common sets of shared assumptions. So the structural problem of politics today is not simply that ruling elites are detached from the people—that’s happened before—but that they now hold and promote an ideology which is the opposite of how ordinary people see the world, and generally inimical to their interests. And rather than seek to persuade, which is outside their capabilities, they use insults and threats instead.

In previous eras, the lower orders have often tried to ape the ruling classes: not so today, because there is nothing there worth imitating. In particular ruling elites in the past have generally had a strong shared, and often inherited, culture, which others have tried to emulate. Now let me say immediately, to forestall any comments, that there are multiple conflicting definitions of “culture,” and I don’t have the space to go into them here. I will simply take “culture” to be the complex of shared assumptions, beliefs, identities and intellectual and physical artefacts that characterise and unite a group. You can compare it, if you like, to the operating system of a computer. The higher the level of trust and mutual understanding in a culture (often referred to as a “high-context” culture), the more smoothly things run, and the fewer rules and laws you need. The explosion of rules and laws in recent decades is to a large degree because the West is moving rapidly towards a “low context” culture, where even the most basic issues are argued about, and so everything has to be exhaustively negotiated and written down.

In  part this is because the Party itself has no real culture of its own: there is a gigantic vacuum where its heart and its head should be. It views religion as a charming but outdated set of social practices, it sees history as dangerous because it contains upsetting episodes and can be misused by “extremists,” it prefers not to speak about great figures of the past, because they often had the wrong ideas and said the wrong things, and it has replaced the multiplicity of western languages with Globisch: a distorted and clumsy form of English with French loan-words. If traditional elites promoted “culture” in the artistic sense, the Party distrusts and denigrates it, except where it can be marketed as a commodity, or manipulated for political objectives.

It is also profoundly ignorant of this level of “culture” as a whole, and distrusts what it does not understand: witness the desperate adolescent desire to shock in the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. Europe has an almost inconceivably rich cultural and intellectual heritage, but you will find none of it in the official activities of the European institutions, which practice instead the suppression of national history and culture, and the abolition, so far a possible, of distinctions between nations. (Consider the Euro banknotes with completely abstract designs, probably a first in history.) Thus, “European values” turn out on examination to be imported social justice clichés from the US, which the Commission is now busy trying to force on the rest of the world.

But that’s not really surprising. The European Branch of the Party (Airstrip One and Eurasia, if you like) is pretty uncultured these days. It watches US TV series at home and superhero movies on long-distance Business-Class flights. It finances, but does not go to see, films on western social justice themes by Third World directors, who at least get to make films even if nobody in their own country watches them. It funds, but does not read, internet sites and printed publications promoting social justice agendas abroad. So are there really people in Brussels, then, who think that European populations will make sacrifices, and even fight, for “European values”? As I’ve said before, nobody is going to die for the Eurovision Song Contest.

Having an uncultured ruling class is dangerous enough, but the destruction of popular culture over the last fifty years by the demons of neoliberalism has now created a cultural void at all levels. Popular culture depended on the extended family, the Church, local communities, voluntary organisations, factories and mines, even football and cricket teams that served to bring people together, all of which have been ground up in the mills of neoliberalism. The “popular culture” of today is no longer generated from below, but imposed from above, largely as a way of persuading people to consume. (And yes, Orwell did foresee that with his idea of “prolefeed:” garbage to keep the proles happy.) The effect of mass deregulation of TV, never mind the Internet, is not only a race to the bottom in quality, but more importantly populations that are increasingly less well informed and less able to make judgements.

With this of course goes education. Conservative forces opposed compulsory education for generations because they perceived, quite correctly, that education is inherently subversive, and that once you teach people to read, you start to lose control over them. For that reason, education was historically a great cause of the Left, but this changed after the 1970s because of blah blah Illic blah blah indoctrination blah blah schools are like prisons, and so forth. So among all wings of the Party there is now a consensus that education doesn’t matter that much, except for the children of Party cadres. Manufacturing and technical jobs have now gone, filthy or dangerous jobs can be done by immigrants, and, whilst forcing young people to train at University to work in call centres is not strictly necessary, it keeps the unemployment figures down, and is a good money-earner. But “education” in the traditional sense is no longer prized: indeed it’s rapidly recovering the dangerous status it had a couple of centuries ago.

Even scientists and engineers can be bought in, or contracted out, or at least that’s what was thought. But what MBAs don’t realise is that not all professionals are fungible like they are. So in France, where the once-great health system is in trouble, fewer and fewer French people want to train as doctors, and many areas of France are described as “medical deserts” where even finding a family doctor is a challenge. So the answer, of course, is to buy-in doctors from Eastern Europe, where the training is of an acceptable quality. Problem solved. Well, except that not many of these doctors speak good French, let alone technical medical French, and good luck with a family of recent Algerian immigrants whose own French is pretty shaky.

This kind of situation can be sustained for a while, even with a ruling class whose ideology and philosophy of life amount to a cultural void. But we are reaching the point in many western countries, where society is so fractured that its component parts literally no longer talk the same language any more. It’s not just that the PMC and its media organs might as well be talking Martian for all that ordinary people understand them, it’s also that different parts of society now no longer know how to talk to each other. In many countries, urban and rural populations are now two separate nations. And of course there are separate nations now, with the uncontrolled immigration of the last generation. Europe contains entire communities who live together by their own rules under their own authorities and do not feel obliged to respect the law or social customs. (The Party, patronising about religion as it is, has never understood this.)

Whatever you think of the abstract merits of immigration policies, they have observably produced societies where even the minimum degree of cultural cohesion does not exist. For example, imagine this. A meeting between the head teacher of a school in a rough area of France, a woman near retirement who has been a committed Socialist all her life and grew up in the countryside when the baleful influence of the Church was still pervasive, and the Imam of a local mosque come from Tunisia, who teaches his congregation that women should stay at home and not work, and that boys and girls should be separately educated. He’s come to complain that girls at the school are wearing dresses and skirts that reveal part of their legs, and this is shocking to many Muslim parents. So how would such a conversation progress? How would it even start?

There have been divided societies in the past: socially, racially, religiously and everything else you can think of. But there was a common basis of understanding for the arguments and even the conflicts. Indeed, the bitterest disagreements were very often over the interpretation of the same points of history, or the meaning of the same symbol. But we don’t have divided societies now, we have atomised ones. For all the fashionable talk of “civil war,” a civil war requires organised parties competing for control of the future of the political system. We don’t have that, we just have individuals, and small groups without much cohesion, united only in their detestation for the system.

I’m not sure that it is really possible for a society without a common culture to survive for very long. The Party, unlike in 1984, is incompetent and cannot stand up to serious organised opposition. But that’s the problem, there isn’t any. Oh, there’s plenty of opposition, but it is disorganised, often at cross-purposes, and doesn’t know what it wants. All the Party has to do to survive is to be minimally less incompetent and divided than the groups opposing it. It’s possible, of course, as I suggested in an earlier essay, that in the end the Outer Party will turn on the Inner Party, but the problem then is that the Outer Party is for the most part just as dumb as the Inner Party, whose ranks they want to join. You won’t get a revolution out of such people.

If there was hope, thought Winston Smith, it lay with the proles. If only. It certainly doesn’t lie with the Party.